Integrate Unless with Google Analytics

Google Analytics & Unless

Most Unless customers use the Insights to analyze their audiences' performance but if you want to dig deeper or simply prefer to use Google Analytics, you can do so.

Simply navigate to your Integrations, select Google Analytics, and toggle the switch to activate it. Unless will immediately start sending data to the Google Analytics account associated with your website - no need for additional setup.

With this integration, you can deep dive into all KPIs Google Analytics provides (e.g. bounce rate, time-on-page, exit page,...) and get an even better understanding of your Unless audiences.

Google Analytics Events

Once the integration is activated, Unless will start sending events to your GA account for each experience applied to the page and each associated audience. To access information about your events, log into Google Analytics, and navigate to "Behaviour → Events → Top Events".

Unless events consist of three components

For experiences:

• Event Category → called "Unless - experiences"
• Event Action → equals the name of your Experience (e.g. "Headline test")
• Event Label → equals "Seen" or "Not seen" to differentiate between visitors who have seen the experience applied and the ones who are part of the control group

For audiences:

• Event Category → called "Unless - audiences"
• Event Action → equals the name of your Audience (e.g. "Visitors from Facebook")
• Event Label → equals "Participant" or "Control group" to differentiate between visitors who set as participants or the once that are part of the control group

Basic Analytics - Performance

To demo how to analyze your Unless setup using GA, we used the account of our customer Peecho. They created two audiences and two personalizations of their homepage so their setup looks like this:

Now, the following information will appear in Google Analytics:

• Event Category → "Unless - audiences"
• Event Action → "Self-Publisher" and "Artist"
• Event Label → "Participant" or "Control Group"

Under Event Action you can see how often each Audience was triggered. Add the secondary dimension Page if you linked the Audience to multiple pages. In this case, both Audiences are only connected to a personalization of the homepage (click to enlarge).

By switching to the metric group "Site Usage" you can learn more about the visitors' overall sessions.

Advanced Analytics - Goals & Segments

If you don't want to use the built-in goal tracking of Unless, you can track conversions and other goals using GA. For this, you first need to set up GA goals. Next, you can create custom segments (the set up of the segment depends on your goal). To illustrate, we set up this custom segment (tracking how many users looked up Peecho's /pricing/ page):

Now, we have to apply this segment to our Unless Audiences:

Zoomed in:

We can see that out of 70 users who are part of the Self-Publisher Audience, 61 looked up the pricing page - that's 87%! That indicates that the personalizations set up for this Audience are successfully steering Self-Publishers towards this goal. However, only 9 out of 25 people who are part of the Artist Audience completed the goal (36%). We should probably improve the personalizations for this Audience.

What Metrics to measure with Google Analytics

Of course, your goal is the main metric to determine the success of your personalizations. However, Google Analytics is a great source for analyzing secondary performance metrics.

• Avg. Session Duration → How much time did people spend on my site? Did personalization increase session duration?
• Bounce Rate → How many visitors left after only looking at the entry page? Did personalization lower drop-off rate?
• Pageviews per Session → How many pages did people visit on average? In other words: did personalization grab their attention?